Successful In-Game Ads: The Secret Sauce for Monetization

Tammy Levy spoke this week at Casual Connect Europe, sharing Kongregate's experience on how we've been able to successfully monetize in-game ads. Using case studies from AdVenture Capitalist, Bullet Boy and Epic Skater, she shows good and bad ad implementation.

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Ads in mobile games are more popular than ever. Ads can come in the form of interstitial banners, non-rewarded video, rewarded video, offerwalls, and other native forms. Some games, often casual, can be solely supported by ad revenue. Even for games with options for in-app purchases (IAP), Kongregate typically finds that in-game ads can account for 10-50% of all revenue. This “ad”ded revenue is nice but often lives independently of IAP revenue, typically in the dashboard of various ad networks or your mediation solution. Developers should be looking at both the revenue generated from ads and IAPs in order to determine ARPU, as we do at Kongregate. If you are running paid marketing campaigns for your game, this is essential to acquiring as many new users as possible. Most ad networks will rank your offers against other advertisers' offers based on the CPM cost of your ads (the cost per 1,000 impressions). Even if you are bidding on a cost-per-install (CPI) basis, ad networks will always optimize your campaigns based on the CPMs you generate for them. Demand

About a year ago, I gave a talk to a small group of mostly indie and small-studio game developers about how to incorporate the UI process into their games, and one of the pieces of advice I haphazardly slapped on an ending slide was, “Think like a player [when looking at the UI for your game].” Essentially, I was asking developers to remove themselves from the game that they had poured their blood, sweat, and tears into. To the surprise of probably no one, the first question I got was, “How do I do that?” So, how do you do it? Let's say you have a Store for your game, and it's really important because, well, it pays the bills. You want to find out if the button to the Store is easily found. But you had added the button months ago, have play-tested the game every day since then, and now can find it with your eyes closed. How do you go from being the person who knows this game the best, into someone who knows the least? There

Advertising in games has proven to be a great source of revenue for game developers. In many cases, ads increase the revenue baseline and provide the ability to monetize genres that historically hadn’t monetize before, such as endless runners and roguelikes. In preparation for Kongregate’s presentation at Casual Connect, we did a deep dive into the performance of ads in most of our titles. With only 20 minutes to present, we were only able to cover the highlights, which left out a lot of additional information and data worth sharing. Rewarded Video These are “opt-in” video ads that a player chooses to watch. Unlike interstitial videos that automatically appear at predetermined locations and cadences, the decision to watch a rewarded video is in the player’s hands. In exchange for watching the video, players will get a reward in the game. This can be any type of reward. Today, rewarded videos are the most popular ad types, providing both high payouts (CPMs), a lot of inventory and high player engagement, all resulting in higher revenue potential. Player Engagement